Since September 1962, hardly a week has passed without a major armed confrontation or an outright war in Yemen. The number of long-lasting insurgencies, mutinies, rebellions, or terrorism-related activities that took place during this period numbers in the dozens. Despite the duration of all these conflicts, and although they may have caused as many as half a million of deaths, the rest of the world has heard very little about them. At best, Yemen is nowadays known as a hotbed of international terrorism, an area that is on the receiving end of frequent U.S. air strikes flown by UAVs, or as some place fiercely bombarded by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

While at least some details about British operations in what was Southern Arabia of the 1960s have been published over the years, next to nothing is known about the activities of local air forces. This is even more surprising, considering that for nearly two decades there were no less than two, fully-developed services of that kind – one operated by what was then North Yemen, another by what used to be South Yemen – and that these were deeply involved in the Cold War, too.

Using newly released secret intelligence sources, neglected memoirs, and popular memory, this tells the story of military aviation in Yemen since 1962. It provides in-depth insights and analysis of campaigns fought by the Egyptian air force during the 1960s, the creation of two Yemeni air forces in the 1970s, an entire series of inter-Yemeni wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Containing over 140 photographs, color profiles, maps and extensive tables, Hot Skies over Yemen is a richly illustrated and unique point of reference about one segment of modern aerial warfare that remains entirely unknown until today.